


auribus teneo lupum

by queen_edmund_pevensie



Category: The Originals (TV), The Vampire Diaries & Related Fandoms, The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: 2x03, Angst, Childhood Trauma, Family, Pre-Series, every mother's son tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:47:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23404756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queen_edmund_pevensie/pseuds/queen_edmund_pevensie
Summary: Esther hands Niklaus a necklace. It is a promise that she will be with him always.
Kudos: 6





	auribus teneo lupum

“Father is going to take me hunting tomorrow,” says Niklaus tiredly to his two older brothers. “That’s what he said to me just now: ‘Niklaus I am going to take you hunting tomorrow.’” It is late afternoon, and Niklaus’ hair is gold in the dying light. They are walking back slowly from the woods to their home, the three oldest Mikaelson boys, Finn in the lead, Elijah and Niklaus close behind. Their mother sent them out with their father to check the traps, and Mikael stayed behind to check a few more, sending his sons back home. Finn and Elijah both carry their fair share of weight, but once Mikael was out of sight, Elijah took Niklaus’ burden since the boy was lagging behind. Now free from it, he can keep up, but his face is dark the way it often is after Niklaus speaks with his father.   
“That’s good,” grunts Finn. “Men are hunters and farmers, and you will soon be a man like me and Elijah.”   
Niklaus huffs and kicks a pebble with all his might. “Father doesn’t think so,” he grumbles, watching the small stone bump harmlessly against the back of Finn’s heel. “I think he hates me.”   
“He doesn’t hate you,” Finn groans, shifting his load on his back to turn and look Niklaus in the eye. Niklaus sneers at him. “He doesn’t hate any of us. He’s had a hard life. It’s just how fathers are.”   
Niklaus sighs, staring past Finn, staring past the house, into the hills that surround their home. “I don’t want to go hunting with him, though,” Niklaus insists. “Remember last time?”   
Yes, Elijah thinks. Dark bruises on Niklaus’ arms from where Mikael gripped him, and an open wound on his face from where he hit him. It’s far from the first time. He’s hit all of them, save for Rebekah and baby Henrik, though it’s only a matter of time, and even Finn is very careful around their father. But Niklaus does seem to have a particular talent for incurring their father’s wrath. Even today, the hour they spent checking the traps with him, Niklaus was singled out, pulled, pushed, and berated by Mikael while he left Elijah and Finn alone.   
Even Finn looks back at them with sympathy now. “You’ll only make it worse, Niklaus,” he says gravely.   
This does little to comfort him, shockingly. The nearer they get, the antsier Niklaus becomes. They hear their mother’s voice call out for them, they see her in the threshold, waiting, Rebekah and Kol tumbling past each other and around their mother’s legs. To Elijah, this is peace at last. But Niklaus is drawing further and further behind until they are at last at the house and unloading the game, and Niklaus is nowhere to be found.   
Finn sighs, finally putting down his load behind the house. “He’s got to be kidding,” he grumbles. But Elijah knows that he is not. He is scared, slipping away to be alone, away from their family, somewhere where Mikael cannot find him and he doesn’t have to face their father tomorrow morning.   
Elijah is fourteen now, practically a man, and, Elijah thinks bitterly, a man his father always says he could be proud of. Mikael is not proud of him, though. He has no time for any of them, except for Finn, who really is a man now and who Mikael never hits or berates, and who is following him very closely behind in a way that is beginning to grate at Elijah’s patience.   
“We ought to go after him,” Finn insists. “Come on, Niklaus cannot insist on behaving like a child and then get upset when people treat him like one.”   
Elijah rolls his eyes. Niklaus is hiding, and he is hiding from Mikael. At least Finn isn’t foolish enough to suggest the Niklaus is a coward. There is something unsettling about their father’s treatment towards their brother. As cruel and dismissive as he is towards everyone else, as different as Finn claims he is from the father of his youth, Mikael can barely stand to be in the same room as Niklaus, and tomorrow, Niklaus and Mikael are to make yet another excursion to try and get Niklaus to shoot straight. It will amount to nothing. In spite of all the practice Elijah has been doing with him, Niklaus is no better than he was two weeks ago, the last time Mikael took him out. This is a particular sore spot between the two of them, a sore spot both Finn and Elijah have been dragged into. When Elijah tries to help, Mikael scoffs at his attempts to teach the unteachable, and if he dares try to defend his brother – Mikael will hit him and beat Niklaus twice as much as he had set out to – for insolence, he says. Finn’s attempts are dismissed entirely as useless, and Niklaus is called hopeless and Elijah knows that he doesn’t even try when he’s with Finn because he’s so resentful of the fact that Finn is never punished. Finn has never done anything to be punished for, Elijah points out, but of course, half the time, neither does Niklaus.   
“He’ll be fine,” Elijah says, not stopping his determined trek back to the front of the house. Elijah and Finn both have found him before, and they could find him again. He’s slipped away, like he often does. “He’s frightened. Just leave it.”   
“Of what, of Father? Maybe if he just did –” Finn cuts himself off. If he just did what he was told. Too simple of a solution to a much more complicated problem. And neither of them really understand what the problem is too begin with, anyway. Just that Niklaus is afraid of Mikael, and he has good reason to be.   
They turn the corner. Elijah determined to pretend nothing is the matter. Finn resigned to stand by his brothers. For now, at least.   
There is their mother, smiling at them radiantly, the setting sun all around her. She presses a kiss to both Finn and Elijah’s head, the attentive mother, but it is not until she is sitting down to join her children that she counts heads. Henrik has already been fed, but still, there is one missing. “Where is Niklaus?” she asks. Elijah can tell she saw him as they were coming up the hill.   
Finn meets Elijah’s eyes. Elijah shakes his head. Niklaus was desperate when he went off.   
“Finn? Elijah?” she presses. Rebekah and Kol are already fighting for Niklaus’ portion. Elijah squares his jaw resolutely. He promised not to tell. Mother will tell Father, and then – well, maybe Finn is right, maybe this is just making it all so much worse.   
“He’s in the woods, hiding,” Finn says under his mother’s leveling gaze. Elijah shoots him a dirty look. “From Father.”   
Good thing Mikael isn’t around to hear it. Their mother’s face falls into a perplexing look, caught somewhere between grief and understanding. “Thank you, Finn,” she says, and blows out of the house and into the woods to find Niklaus. 

He is where he always hides from Mikael. That is where Esther finds him.  
He is small for his age, and frail looking, though she knows him to be strong. She’s seen him wrestle with his brothers and pick fights with the other boys in the village, but at this instant, all Esther sees in her son is any boy, cowed and humiliated by a father who cannot accept him. She knows that it is her fault. She could do more to protect him against Mikael. She has to do more. Mikael’s anger with him only grows every day.   
“What are you doing out here?” she asks, settling onto the ground next to him.   
Niklaus stares past her. “Father is to take me hunting tomorrow,” he says to his knees. “But I am no good.” He looks up at her, her son, trusting and smart and terrified of a man who he wants nothing more than to please. “Not with him.” Another pause, terrified that by simply telling Esther what Mikael does to him he will incur his father’s wrath. “He gets angry at me.”   
She sighs and settles herself on the ground next to him. “I understand,” she sighs. Understands his terror, his humiliation, his powerlessness to stop or appease the man he thinks is his father. Her fault. If she were braver she could stand up to Mikael, take refuge from him, but she has no family here, no one to support her. And Niklaus suffers for it. He suffers because of her mistakes, her cowardice. “Do you know what I do when I am afraid?” He looks up at her with big skeptical eyes. “I listen to the starlings.”  
Niklaus bites his lip. He is not hopeful that Esther’s remedy will aid him much, but he is willing to try anything. She smiles.   
“When I was little girl, my mother taught one of them a tune,” she recounts. She can see it now, her mother and Dahlia in the woods, until they came across a starling. Long before Mikael’s people came to her home, long before Dahlia was transformed. Before either of them knew anything of magic. The tune her mother taught them was simple, beautiful, one that Esther and Dahlia would sing with the birds. She hasn’t sung it in years; she hasn’t thought of her mother since they came to the New World. “And because they mimic each other’s songs, it spread, until every starling in the forest sang it.” In the days after her people were attacked, it was all she and Dahlia had left of their family. The Viking brutes couldn’t stop the starlings from singing even if they tried. Her mother might have been dead, but Esther was not alone. She had her sister, she had her mother’s memory. In those first days after they attacked, before she met Mikael, she held onto anything that kept her feeling like things were normal. Years later, after her old life was nothing more than a distant memory, when Mikael forced them across the ocean, to a brand new world, she couldn’t leave it all behind. “When we made this our home, I brought those same birds to these woods,” she tells him. They don’t all sing her mother’s songs, but enough do that sometimes, in the very early mornings, she can still feel her, as if she is brushing her hair or taking her hand. Sometimes, it is as if Dahlia is still by her side.   
Finn is waiting for them, greeted by a sneer from Niklaus that Esther pretends she does not see, and they traipse back, all feeling a little braver. Mikael does not come home for some hours, when all the boys are outside and Rebekah is helping tend to Henrik. When he does come inside, Rebekah scampers out to join her brothers and does not return, and Esther and Mikael do not say a word to one another until all the children are asleep. When he does speak, his tone is cold and harsh. “Let’s see if I can make anything of that son of yours,” he growls. Esther knows that no matter what happens tomorrow, he will not be satisfied. 

Niklaus and Mikael return, none the worse, from their hunting excursion. Gently, Esther might try to remind Mikael that the boy is not yet ten years old, or that being a hunter is not the only thing a young man is good for, but she does not try to argue with the look on his face. Niklaus keeps his eyes on the ground, but he is whole and without any of the obvious marks Mikael usually leaves on him. He trudges inside, scraping his boots against the floor and disappears. Mikael stares at Esther, his eyes like ice. “Men who cannot kill are worth nothing,” he says. 

Father hates him. He grows more sure of it every day. Recently, Elijah has not even tried to tell him that he doesn’t. Father hates him for his weakness, and his clumsiness, and his smart mouth, but Niklaus cannot seem to do anything to please Father; everything he does seems to make it worse. He was right to try to slip away, but he hadn’t gotten very far before he had to stop. Where would he go? He hadn’t been able to convince Elijah to leave with him, and he couldn’t fend for himself. Father was right about him, he was too weak to be of any use to anyone.   
He tries to wipe away his tears before Mother comes back inside to ask him what happened, but he is not quick enough. She looks at him strangely for a second and then sits at the table and begins to hum. Klaus watches her for a while. She is clasping something in her hand, something on a leather band. He watches her when she stands up, gathers ingredients from jars that he and the others are not allowed to touch, and sits back down. He’s only seen her practice magic a few times – mostly simple remedies, mostly to calm Father’s nerves – but he would recognize it anywhere.   
“What are you doing?” he asks. Mother looks up at him, smiles, lets the pendant fall from her fist, dipping it in the thick liquid.   
“Come here, Klaus,” she says, beckoning him over. He can see it clearly now in the candlelight, a charm in the shape of a bird. She slips the necklace over his head; the bird lands heavily against his chest, warm from the spell she put it on. “If ever you are lost, or scared, or in need of me, just clasp the bird and I will come.”   
A necklace to protect him. To protect him from Father. “Do the others get one?”   
Something funny plays across Mother’s face. “I love all my children,” she says with warm certainty. “But you, Niklaus, you’re the most special.” Her hand is soft against his. Special in the way that he is a slower learner than the others, and special in the way that he is smaller than the others, and special in the way that Father hates him. He tries hard to not start crying again. “Promise me you will wear it always,” Mother begs him.   
“I promise,” he says. The warmth from the charm spreads to his body. It doesn’t matter what it’s for, he decides. He claps the bird in his hand, and Mother smiles.   
“I am right here, Niklaus,” she says, pressing a kiss to his forehead. “It works.” 

The proof, which Klaus collects while he is growing up, is that his mother always comes when he needs her. A week later when he gets separated from Finn and Elijah, when he is thirteen and breaks his ankle. Several times, when Mikael turns on him in a blind rage, Klaus’ fear reaches out for the starling, thinking of the birdcall in the woods that always reminds him of his mother’s voice, and she is there, towering behind Mikael, as if she materialized at Niklaus’ call. Mikael calls him a coward and turns away, and perhaps it would have been better to take Mikael’s punishment like a man, but there is such instant relief when he sees his mother there; his constant protector. He does not take it off; he feels anxious and naked the few times the knot has come undone or the strap has broken and he has had to mend it; anxious, naked, angry that his mother has made him so dependent on her, that he is a man and cannot defend himself from his own father, and he thinks of throwing the whole thing away. He clutches it in his hand, hold the delicate starling up to the light and sighs. He was only a boy when his mother gave it to him, a boy who had a talent for getting into trouble, and for incurring the wrath of their irascible father in terrifying and escalating fits, and she was worried for him. He hardly uses it, but it’s still a comfort. Niklaus ties it around his neck again, the familiar weight of it as comforting as his mother’s hand itself. Now, sixteen, he doesn’t need her to come to his rescue quite so often, but it’s nice to know that she would, if he ever needed her. 

Something is terribly wrong, Esther thinks, seconds before Elijah comes bursting inside. He is frazzled and panting, her normally composed and stoic boy nearly coming apart at the seams. There is very little that could shake him this way; Esther knows, the way a mother ought, before the words even leave his mouth.   
“Niklaus!” He stands in the threshold, his hands gripping the frame so tightly his knuckles are turning white. His face is wild with fear. “Please, Mother, you must help him!” Elijah looks like a phantom himself. “Father – they – ” Elijah gasps wildly. “Niklaus said you wouldn’t help him, but –”  
“Elijah!” Esther grips him by the shoulders firmly. “I would rather die than watch any of my children suffer. Where is he? Where is your brother?”   
Elijah gasps, and tells her, but she already knows, the warmth and knowledge that comes from the spell she placed on the necklace. Fear, fury building inside of her. Had Mikael finally done it, killed the boy, found out the truth? Had something – something worse happened? Would her husband and son both still be alive?   
Yes. There he was. Niklaus. Screaming his head off, pinned to a tree, a sword sticking out of his left shoulder, but Mikael had meant to hurt, to maim even, but not kill Niklaus. There was blood dried under his mouth and nose and tear wet on his face, his knees buckling under the weight of his own weakening body, and in his limp hand – the starling necklace. Mikael was nowhere to be found.   
She can never get a straight story out of him, but she doesn’t really expect to. The relief that Mikael still lives, that Niklaus will too, and that Niklaus didn’t kill him is too great to even really listen to whatever else he has to say on the matter. Why he thought to challenge Mikael, the sudden supernatural rage that overtook him when Mikael stole Esther’s gift to him. She can’t get it out of Elijah either. He says he wasn’t there, only stumbled on Niklaus after he saw Father acting smug, and once Niklaus is resting and healing, Elijah won’t leave his brother’s side.   
Mikael is walking up the hill toward the house. “I hear the boy has survived,” he says blandly. He can, indeed, hear.   
“Mikael –” she starts, but he rounds on her, fire in his eyes.  
“You coddle the boy,” he seethes. “Nothing more than a flesh wound. If I wanted him dead, he’d be dead. There is something wrong with Niklaus, but today – today I saw a flash of who he might become. I was almost proud.” He scoffs, pushing past Esther, who is frozen in place. “If it weren’t for you, he could be something, but he’s desperate for your protection. Always has been. A shame.”   
Mikael goes inside. Niklaus quiets. Esther cannot move. 

Niklaus is so busy trying to hold himself together that he doesn’t notice the hunger until after they all feed for the first time. Rebekah kills, then Kol. They discover they cannot walk in the sun, and Mother says they are safe forever because they destroyed all of the white oak in existence. His starling charm still rests on his chest, but it has lost much of the warmth it once held. Mother tells him not to worry – the magic of it was lost when they were reborn, but she loves him just the same, and he is a man now and doesn’t need a little charm to keep him safe. And he’s more than a man, they all are.   
He feels nothing like he did before.   
Elijah kills. Finn.   
Niklaus will not even feed at first. The sight of blood sickens him. All he sees is Henrik as he bled out in his arms, the wolves tearing into his brother’s flesh. He can hear his brother’s cries as if it’s happening again, right in front of him. The fear, the grief, the anger – all as if it’s still happening. Henrik dying over and over again forever. Mother says it’s a side effect of the spell to make them strong and that it will pass, but Niklaus can barely make it through the long days and long nights without tearing into the wolves. Not from hunger. From boredom, from anger, from grief.   
Mikael kills. He seems to revel in it.   
It is dark. It’s all so much worse at night. He can see the death of Henrik so much more clearly in the dark, and they do not sleep anymore, not really. Mother says that this will pass as well. Niklaus is beginning to suspect that she doesn’t know any more than the rest of them, but he cannot bear the thought of the rest of his life passing unending without change, without sleep. He is walking; it is all he knows how to do anymore.   
A branch snaps. From the corner of his eye, he sees a shape moving in the dark. Fear as if he’s being hunted, and the same stale scent from the night Henrik died. It was just last week, but it feels like a lifetime ago. Whoever it is, they’re one of the wolves and they’re loud. He follows them, only half aware of what he’s doing, and then, a stronger scent comes to him. It’s their blood, warm in their veins, pumped from their heart into the rest of their body. For the first time the thought of it doesn’t make him sick. The turning in his stomach is different; it’s hunger and he is horribly, ravenously hungry.   
His new fangs are deep in the man’s neck before he can stop himself. In the last few days, his siblings have learned to control the way they feed, but Niklaus has not fed yet, not since Father forced them to the night they were reborn. It’s like he can breathe. Like he’s never been strong before, never been alive before. The man stops struggling in his arms and Niklaus drops him.   
First, a split second before it happens, he reaches for the starling on his chest, his fingers clasping at it desperately, but he knows his mother will not come to his rescue this time. Then, the worst pain he has ever experienced as his leg snaps and he collapses next to the body of the man he killed. Elijah and Father come tumbling out of the woods. He doesn’t think this happened to the others, but he cannot think through the pain and he is so relieved to see them; maybe the charm worked after all, maybe Mother sent them to rescue him, maybe –  
He screams and Elijah launches forward, ready to help, but Father’s arm stops him. Niklaus has never felt such pain before in his life. Every bone is breaking, every molecule of him shifting. This didn’t happen with the others, this isn’t supposed to happen when they feed, why is it happening to him? Is he finally proven too weak to even bear the curse Father has put on him? He wants to cry, but he can’t. Every part of him is consumed with the pain.   
Dully he hears Father’s voice: “He’s a beast.” And just as quickly as it began, the pain is gone.   
He wakes up in a field, surrounded by the bodies of villagers; his own people, and the people who killed Henrik alike. He can feel the blood drying in his hair and on his face, but he doesn’t remember doing it, except for the thrill of exhilaration and anger that brought him here, far away from his family. Elijah has followed him anyway.   
The question hangs in the air. Elijah does not seem to have anything more than a warning for him.   
What have I become?   
“Father is beside himself with rage,” Elijah whispers into Niklaus’ ear. His father’s word from last night strike him like a blow, the horror and rage on his face. For a selfish second Niklaus is glad he is here and not at home, where Mikael’s ire is surely getting the best of him. He is alone in this, cursed to change, though the moon was not full last night, and the only way one can be like the wolves is if one is a wolf, and – the shame of it washes over him hot and sticky like the blood that is now on his hands. He wants to clutch the necklace like he has done so many times, but it is gone, ripped from his neck – not that it would do him much good anymore, not that he would want to use it to call his mother to him anyway, even if it would still work. He is wholly changed. He hardly feels like himself at all.   
After the shame, there is a calm, unending numbness and resolution. Twenty years’ worth of an explanation of Mikael’s cruelty and his fear. “He is not my father, is he?”   
Elijah does not answer. He pulls Niklaus close and makes half a promise before he takes off after Tatia. In his brother’s absence, the only thing left to do is cry, until the night comes and he is shivering in spite of the how he knows he cannot freeze, and he does not feel anything but the chill of the night and the hunger, which has returned with a vengeance. Is this to be his life now? Hunger and cold? He could not bear it if it were.   
Eventually, Elijah does he return. He moves stiffly, his face is blank. Father – Mikael – follows close behind. “Stand up, boy!” Mikael shouts a meter away. Elijah hauls him to his feet. “We’re going to settle this – now!”   
So Niklaus lets Elijah lead him to the clearing where he has learned his mother did the first spell. She is there, but she will not look at him. She is chanting softly and will not even look in his direction. What he wants is an explanation, for Elijah to say something to him, for his mother to tell him that this is all some kind of misunderstanding and that they are all the same – all her children, and all Mikael’s children. It is not forthcoming. The truth settles heavy into his stomach. Esther had seven children. Niklaus was the most special because he was a mistake, her secret shame. He has a father somewhere, and it is not the man Esther let hurt him for twenty years.   
“Come on, Niklaus,” Elijah whispers again, his hands firm around his arm. He has stopped in the middle of the clearing. Elijah is dragging him forward still.   
Mikael reappears from the darkness. Niklaus had lost sight of him for a while but there he is with chains and fire in his eyes, and he yanks Niklaus from Elijah’s grip and he starts to drag him towards a post and chain him there. Struggle as he might, Mikael is stronger than he is and the chains are spelled so he cannot break free.   
“Elijah!” he calls. His mother will not look at him, so he does not bother entreating her help. “Help me, please! Please, let me go!” Freedom. It’s the only thing that matters. He does not even know what they are doing, but he thinks, from the sour look on Mikael’s face and from Esther and Elijah’s downcast eyes it has to do with what was discovered today. “Please!” He looks up at his mother, preparing something awful and powerful. He can smell it in the air, the fear, the shame. He is the cause of both. He is dangerous, more so than the others, and he is wrong. A mistake, a bastard. Perhaps Mikael is going to kill him, perhaps he’s convinced Elijah to help. Elijah is holding him down now; it is all over, no use to even fight against it. They are going to kill him, wild fear courses through his body. The discovery was too much for even Elijah, and even he has now turned against him, agreed to end his horrible suffering. But there’s no point in fighting it.   
Mother is holding something glowing up with tongs from the fire and approaches. She touches it to his forehead and it is this pain that finally brakes him. Perhaps it is worse because he knows it will be the last thing he ever feels. He loses consciousness, hardly comforted at all that soon, it will all be over. 

He wakes up at home in a haze. Everything is different, though he is sure how. Everything is still and quiet. He can hear for miles, and nothing is moving. He pushes himself up. Where his mother branded him – his forehead, his palms – is healed already, but he can tell that something was done to him. Elijah held him, Father chained him, Mother cursed him. The second curse put on him in just a few days, but this is different. Instead of awakening something inside of him, he feels like something has died. Something real, something that has always been a part of him is gone. He looks around his home, the home he’s lived in for his whole life. No one is around. Everything is different – no matter the time, his home has always been busy with life. His mother making medicines and tinctures or food to feed her family, and his siblings helping and hindering the progress of their community, or Father, blustering in a rage or proudly announcing his accomplishments. Niklaus is twenty-two years old, and he has never been here when it has been so deathly quiet. Even when Father would sleep, when Mother would put him in a deep sleep when he came home so out of his mind, and she begged them to all be quiet or to play where they wouldn’t disturb him, there wouldn’t be so much quiet. It isn’t peace, the longed for peace Mother always said she longed for. Everything is different. Everyone is gone.   
He leaves his home. He doesn’t bring anything with him, but he is sure he cannot bear to see it again, to even cross the threshold one more time to gather his remaining things tucked away in some corner. He walks around the village in a haze. It is unnaturally still here, too. Early morning, the sun just peaking over the horizon, fog laying thick over their homes and farms. He stumbles a little and looks down, and falls to his hands and knees. The cool wet grass sticks to his hands as he grasps for the figures hand in the mist. It is the body of a young villager, one around his own age, one of the wolves who used to play with the other villagers when they were all younger, who told wild tales of what the wolves got up to. He cannot remember the boy’s name, but once, they might have been friends. Niklaus swallows. In another life, they might have been family.   
He looks up; the valley is scattered with bodies and he goes to each of them. Each of them are wolves. They are his people. The part of him his mother killed aches. His was Mikael. He knows it. The horror, limbs scattered everywhere in front of him. Is this all the wolves they knew, their friends and neighbors, who welcomed them in this new world when Father wanted nothing more than to make a new start? If only Niklaus hadn’t taken Henrik to see the wolves transform, if only they hadn’t gotten so close because the pull of it was too strong. Was it too strong for his brother, to see what the wolves got up to when the moon was full, or was it only that way for Niklaus, and young, trusting Henrik had simply wanted to see what Niklaus wanted to see? Henrik was curious by nature, and now he was dead, along with all the wolves who had never done them any harm, and along with the part of Niklaus that had a home where his father did not hate him.   
A figure stands out among the carnage. Homes are still blazing. The body is stuck on a pike, and is flayed and bloody. There is a puncture wound in his neck, but whoever did this to the man who has been dead for hours did not really feed on him. They bit him because that is what they do now. Niklaus shudders, and reaches a hand out to the man’s arm, hanging lifeless and useless from the body at a precarious angle.   
“Niklaus!”   
He turns. His mother is standing before him now, her hair matted with blood, her face grimy. Tear tracks stand out stark against the smoke and ash and blood, revealing a bloodless, joyless face.   
“Mother.” A word. He reaches for the starling that used to rest against his chest. It’s there, it must have been replaced while he slept. There she is, always coming when he needs her. “What – what happened here?”   
“M-Mikael –” she chokes out. She looks over his shoulder and sees the body of the man. Special cruelty has been done to him. She cries out in such agonizing misery that Niklaus nearly collapses. The man behind him is his Father. She doesn’t have to name him or tell Niklaus. Her face says it all. Esther collects herself enough to come to Niklaus’ side, she reaches out to him, but suddenly he cannot bear her touch. What has happened here, to him, to them, to his home? How has it all gone so horribly wrong in so little time? Has it ever been right? His real father lays behind him, suspended in midair on a post, left there for Esther and Niklaus to see, to see what happens to those who betray him, who insult him. Niklaus has known his whole life; one day, Mikael would do this to him. It feels more inevitable than it feels like the sudden shock that his mother is experiencing. Mikael has always hated him. Perhaps he has always known, deep down, that Niklaus was not his son, and that is why he resented him, or perhaps he hated Niklaus for no other reason that Niklaus was not good enough, but either way, Mikael’s display with his father does not surprise him, and his mother’s explanation about what has happened here does not even phase him – Mikael will return, and he will come after him. She thought that by binding him, then he would be safe, but she was wrong. She was wrong and she was sorry.   
“Bind me?” Niklaus echoes stiffly. “Mother –” He seized by a sudden horrible panic, and urgency for her to explain away the sinking regret that he has only begun to suspect. To tell him that what he has been feeling for the last hour is not true, that she did not –   
“I bound your werewolf gene,” she sobs. “He forced me. I had to.”   
“What does that mean?” He grabs her arms and shakes her, but Esther only sobs harder. Her explanation does not make any sense to him. She never meant for him to find out, never meant for any of this to happen. He shouldn’t know, and he shouldn’t have to transform any more. It’s better this way, she says, and it is the last thing she ever says. The panic, the anger, what she has taken from him, it all washes over him in such a wave that he feels, for a moment like he is drowning.   
He almost did once, when he was thirteen. He and Kol were roughhousing in the river when they were not supposed to, and he slipped on a rock and hit his head. He only lost consciousness for a moment, but it was enough time for water to fill his lungs. The panic and the fire in his lungs nearly killed Kol and Elijah before Finn managed to fish him out. He begged and begged them not to tell Father, but they did anyway; they said that it was important so Mother could tend to him, but back then, he almost wished he had drowned. That’s what it’s like now, water rushing over top of him, the weight of it crushing, his mother’s fingers clawing at his wrists nothing more than what is keeping him under the water. It would be better to be dead than to live like this.   
Eventually, Esther stops struggling and it is like he awakens from a horrible nightmare where his mother is dead at his feet. He is no longer drowning, but he cannot breathe. Father is gone, his mother is dead. He has no idea where Elijah, and Rebekah, and Finn, and Kol have gone to. The man he caught his mother mourning rots behind him. He knows now, a certainty that sits heavy in the back of his mind, that he cannot run away from the curse his mother placed on him. He is a wolf, like the ones who killed his brother. Niklaus collapses into the grass. He waits for hours, clasping the starling on his chest, wishing he could take it all back, begging his mother to wake from the dead. He waits for death, but he knows that it may never come.   
“What happened?” Rebekah’s voice is clear. “Nik? What happened?”   
He stares at his mother’s broken body. The panic resurfaces. Rebekah stands in front of him, her arms loose by her side, horror written all over her face. The revelation that he is not her brother, that Mother betrayed all of them, that he is nothing more than a beast and that he is to be feared; he may turn on them like the wolves of the village turned on Henrik, like one turned their mother against the family. He cannot tell Rebekah the truth. That Esther’s blood is on his hands. He cannot even say the words aloud. He cannot say anything at all. The panic and grief are all so suffocating, but Rebekah is growing impatient, and suspicious, and she is going to leave, she is going to leave him here, among the wolves Father slaughtered, and then Father is going to come back for him and he will be all alone. “Father –” he chokes out. Rebekah’s eyes widen, and Niklaus realizes what he’s done. Blamed Father for Esther’s death.   
Rebekah charges forward, tears already running down her face. “The others – Father was raving when he left,” she whispers conspiratorially to him, like Mikael might be just on the other side of the hill. “He said he was going to undo all Mother’s mistakes.” She wipes her face. “We need to bury her.”   
Niklaus nods numbly and stands, offering a hand up to Rebekah. Then, he scoops up Esther’s body and brings her back to the house. He is stronger now than he was but it is still backbreaking work to dig a grave, and all he can see with each shovel of dirt he upturns is the fear in her eyes when his hands were around her neck, and the final, resigned look on her face when, without thinking, without even really knowing he was doing it, Niklaus plunged his hand into her chest and tore out her heart. Rebekah’s cleaned the body up as best as she could while he dug, but there’s no putting the heart back. Father wanted to undo all that she’s done. Niklaus can’t blame him. Look at him, at the monster she created. He cannot bear to look at her anymore. Regret. Anger. Blame. Guilt. Horrible, suffocating shame. Esther’s face disappears underneath mounds of dirt and Rebekah squeezes his hand tight, says goodbye to her mother. Klaus clasps the starling one more time as Elijah appears from behind the house, urging them onward, someplace Mikael would never look for them, but she does not come to his aid. She would not recognize him, even if she could.

**Author's Note:**

> I have several items I'd like to discuss with you:
> 
> 1\. This started as something COMPLETELY different, but it wasn't working, so now it's this. The completely different thing was...a monstrous undertaking to give a comprehensive fic about the time from Esther's marriage to Mikael to her death (number 1), and for it to be more or less from her POV. However, unlike my pretty similar undertaking with Sky-Walker, I am taking my time with it so that it isn't rushed and I don't post things before they're ready. But because this is now detached from that work, I want people to read this so I can get a couple of responses to things like: tone, character voices/dynamics, etc.  
> 2\. This is, in a lot of ways, a tag to 2x03 (Every Mother's Son). I LOVE season two. I love the idea that until Klaus learned what the starling necklace was it meant enough to him that he KEPT it for a thousand years and then gave it to Marcel.  
> 3\. There is potentially more of this PARTICULAR fic, but we shall see...


End file.
